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This is a guest post by Kristi Finefield, a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division. It was first published on “Picture This,” the division’s blog.

“Thousands of residents stood with necks craned and peered wide-eyed through smudged glass as the moon sped between the sun and earth, gradually shutting off the bright morning light. From President Coolidge to the urchins with bundles of papers under their arms, the city marvelled at the awesome but magnificent sight.”—Washington Post, Jan. 25, 1925

If you take away the obvious differences (Coolidge is president, paperboys on the streets), I imagine a similar scene taking place today during our solar eclipse. As in 1925, Washington, D.C., is outside the “path of totality” but will still be able to witness a partial eclipse, with the moon covering about 80 percent of the sun. (In 1925, it was 95 percent covered.) I expect many will step outside, myself included, and turn their eyes to the sky to witness the phenomenon firsthand. (I plan to wear specially made glasses, rather than relying on “smudged glass,” as mentioned in the article.)

President and Mrs. Coolidge both stood on the White House lawn on a freezing day in January 1925 to view the partial eclipse as it began, as seen below. They watched in the cold for a short while; after the president returned to work, he used his darkened glass plate (which was likely a developed photographic glass plate) to view the eclipse at its peak from inside the White House.

President and Mrs. Coolidge view eclipse of the sun on January 24, 1925.

Other prominent Washington, D.C., officials took the time to view the 1925 eclipse as well, such as Postmaster General Harry New and Gen. John A. LeJeune, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Most relied on a piece of darkened glass for viewing, as depicted in these photos.

Postmaster General Harry New

Gen. John A. LeJeune

Not satisfied with a casual look with the naked eye, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory lined up with their telescopes to get a better view of the 1925 eclipse.

Astronomers at the Naval Observatory

And of course, many were not content to simply watch a solar eclipse, but endeavored to capture and document the event. The eclipse in January 1925 was photographed and filmed from the dirigible USS Los Angeles by a team formed by the U.S. Naval Observatory and the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Some members of the team posed with one of the specially designed cameras destined for the airship in the photo below.

A team planning to photograph the eclipse from the USS Los Angeles pose with a specially designed camera.

Flown into Washington, D.C., in order to be christened by President Coolidge in November 1924, the USS Los Angeles took a tour over the nation’s capital a few months before its eclipse expedition. In the photo below, the airship is above the National Mall, with the U.S. Capitol in the background.

Capturing natural phenomena through a camera lens was nothing new, however. Scientists recognized the usefulness of photography to their work almost immediately after its invention. By the 1850s, photographers began documenting eclipses for scientific study. A volume of photos in the Prints and Photographs Division’s collections systematically shows the incremental phases of the solar eclipse of May 26, 1854. An example of one of the photos is featured below on the top. For comparison, on the bottom is a photo taken in New York during the January 1925 eclipse.

Photo of the May 26, 1854, eclipse

Diamond ring of the 1925 eclipse. Photo by Frederick W. Goetz.

Celestial events such as solar eclipses are studied and documented by scientists and armchair astronomers. Witnessing the totality is an event that drives people to travel thousands of miles. Photographers study methods for capturing images of the moon blocking the sun. But even if you aren’t going to such lengths, all you really have to do today to see something remarkable is take a few minutes and look to the sky—with proper eye protection, of course!

Watch the webcast of a recent lecture at the Library about eclipses. C. Alex Young, solar physicist and associate director for science at the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, spoke about the celestial mechanics of eclipses as well as how NASA will study the August 21, 2017, eclipse.

Robert Hanshew, a photo curator for the U.S. Navy, visits the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division almost every Friday to research images related to naval history. Some of his discoveries from the Library’s collections are featured in a major outdoor public history exhibit that opened this summer. Titled “Behind These Walls,” the exhibit consists of […]

Robert Hanshew visits the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division almost every Friday. Over the past two or so years, he has sorted through literally hundreds of archival boxes containing photographs related to U.S. naval history. On other days of the week, he can often be found at the National Archives. His goal: to find rare […]

Sunshine, long days, trips to the mountains or beaches—we’re now well into the season many people anticipate long in advance of its arrival. A quick online search of the Library’s prints and photographs reveals that enthusiasm for the lazy days of summer is nothing new: the term “summer” elicits thousands of images dating from as […]

This is a slightly abbreviated version of a post by Kristi Finefield, a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division, first published on “Picture This,” the division’s blog. Check out Finefield’s original post for even more fantastic photographs of Wyoming by Carol M. Highsmith. Today, we turn our eyes to the wide open spaces […]

An earlier version of this post, written by Micah Messenheimer, assistant curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division, was published on “Picture This,” the division’s blog. A giant coffee pot that doubles as a restaurant, drive-in movie theaters, old gas pumps and vintage hotels: these are but a few of the examples included […]

(The following is an excerpt from an article by Sara W. Duke from the May/June 2017 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. Duke, curator of popular and applied graphic art, writes about how courtroom illustrations capture the styles of the times in which cases are heard. Read the entire May/June issue here.) “Drawing Justice: […]

The Statue of Liberty arrived at its permanent home on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor at 1 p.m. on June 19, 1885, “snugly packed in the hold of the French transport Isère,” according to a New York Times report the following day. Multiple delegations of dignitaries, 20,000 citizens, and “every species of craft known […]

Military brass, senators, socialites and even babies—these are a handful of Washington, D.C., subjects photographed by Charles Milton Bell (1848–93) during the last quarter of the 19th century. The Library recently digitized more than 25,000 glass plate negatives produced by Bell and his successors between 1873 and the early years of the 20th century. The photographs document […]

Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) loved beautiful gardens. From 1915 through the 1930s, she shared her enthusiasm in lectures to garden club members, museum groups and horticultural societies. No doubt her listeners valued her knowledge of gardens—but they may have enjoyed her visual examples even more. Johnston—one of the first women to achieve international prominence as […]

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